The August 1 announcement was delivered by the over-arching
Movement for Black Lives (MBL), a network of more
than 50 BLM affiliate groups, and it involves a
system known as basic income.

Dorian T. Warren, political scientist and board chair of
theCenter for Community
Change, explains in the policy brief that basic income could
help rectify the vast income and wealth inequality that
plagues the US, so long as it includes a "pro-rated
additional amount" — still in the form of a basic
income — to cover the cost of reparations.

"No other social or economic policy solution today would be
of sufficient scale to eradicate the profound and systemic
economic inequities afflicting Black communities," he
says.

The radical policy idea was initially proposed in the 1960s
and has seen a renewed surge of interest within the last
year. Countries such as Finland, the Netherlands, Canada,
and the US have announced plans to launch basic income
experiments by late 2016 or early 2017.

As technologies such as artificial intelligence and
automated robotics replace greater numbers of jobs in the coming
decades, Warren goes on to argue, "it is likely that Black
America and other populations that are already disadvantaged will
bear the brunt of whatever economic insecurity and volatility
results."

The current solutions to uplift poor Americans — welfare,
food stamps, earned income tax credits — are inherently flawed,
he says, because they focus on the historically unjust
system of work. Basic income ignores how much a person works or
how much they get paid; it hands out the same amount of money to
everyone.